The Brain Dump

9-9-24

Why I Hate Fun

The new 40K game came out and I haven't quite played my brains out, but I've put in more than enough effort. This has reawakened a certain kind of thing I do (and maybe other people) that hasn't been such a big issue now, but it has actually had a significant impact on my enjoyment of el videojuego. I don't know why I do this to myself, but I keep on doing it. Maybe this will give me some insight.

I Used to be Gud

When I had a lot of time for videogames, I used to be pretty damn decent at them. I wasn't MLG level, but I'd argue I was definitely average based on the fact that I was constantly in the middle of the pack with the competitive games of my choice. Not great but not terrible, which I am completely happy with. I'm an average jackass, so it matches up just perfectly. Of course as we get more life responsbilities, we have less time to invest in the stuff we actually want and more on the dumb bullshit we have to in order to keep ourselves from turning into homeless starving vagrants.

Wow, It's SO Hard

Back when I was good at vidya, I would always play the next to the hardest difficulty. Doom was always at Ultra Violence, except when I went full tryhard and played through it on Nightmare. Most other games were exactly the same way. Somewhere along the way it became a point of pride to be able to do that and I kind of made it my MO. This 40K game was a decent challenge, but the difficulty eventually fell off a cliff and turned one of the story missions a huge pain in the ass that took dozens of tries to succeed in completing.

Normally a little challenge is not a big deal and actually helped make action games that much more intense (and fun). This time it all but ruined my enjoyment of the game. It really put me into a bad mood to the point that although I made plans to grind on the game all night, I gave up way early and ended up taking two days to grind through a game with some of my favorite Sci-Fi content. It was super frustrating and kind of depressing that something I had been looking forward to for so long turned out to kick me in the balls and leave me not enjoying the game as much as I had hoped

I am a Filty Casual

As a result of this incident, I have decided that from here on out I'm a strictly "normal mode" kind of player. If I had only followed that rule with this game, I would have completely loved it. Cranking down the difficulty made the game feel awesome and way more like what I had been looking forward to this whole time. Sure, on some level it may be a hit to the ego, but I'm willing to eat a little humble pie if it means I can enjoy my hobby more.